In this brief melee the hood had fallen from the buyer’s head to reveal his face. It was not burnt or pox-marked. On the contrary, it was a well-formed head of noble bearing. He had black hair going silver, and a goatee. That much was obvious as he surveyed the crowd on the Square, which had formed a ring around him and Saturn, well beyond dagger-range. Daniel recognized him (though it took a few moments) as Edouard de Gex.

De Gex made a move toward the parapet. Saturn, not very prudently, reached out and grabbed him. That stopped de Gex in his tracks. Or so it seemed for an instant until Daniel stepped forward through a shoal of smoke and perceived that de Gex had gone over the edge into St. Mary’s Lock, leaving Saturn standing there alone, holding an empty robe.

“WHEN I WAS A BOY, traveling the roads of France with my father-may God have mercy on his soul-and my brother Calvin, we would from time to time overtake a traveling knife-grinder, sweating with the labor of shoving his rig, which was very heavy because of the massive round grindstone. My father, God rest him, was a trader. A merchant. Everything he needed to conduct his business he carried in his head, or in his purse. This Calvin and I considered to be the normal state of affairs. How strange it was, therefore, to see these knife-sharpeners, who could not earn their bread without a great heavy stone! One day Father heard me and Calvin make some mocking comments after we had passed one of these poor hard-working men. He chided us for our arrogance, and gave us a lesson: the grindstone was set in motion by a shove, and kept turning by occasional slaps of the grinder’s hand. If it lacked weight, it would run down so quickly as to be useless. But because of its tremendous mass, it continued to turn with the greatest impetuosity once set in motion. The stone acted, my father said, as a sort of banca, storing up the work that the grinder did sporadically with hand-slaps, and releasing it steadily. This faculty was so essential to the knife-grinder’s work that he willingly pushed that heavy stone up and down hills every day of his life, like Sisyphus.

“When Jack Shaftoe came back to London, he had in his pocket some money given him by the King of France to finance certain schemes and intrigues that Jack was supposed to set afoot here. And, too, there was the promise that more money would be sent to Jack from time to time if Le Roi was pleased with his work. The gold he had in his pocket was like the first great shove that sets the grindstone in motion, and the sums promised later would be like the hand-slaps that keep it from losing its speed. But Jack had the wit to understand that he needed a banca, a store-house of wealth and power in London, so that his operations would run smooth and steady, even when the subsidies were balky and sporadic. It was not possible for him to rely upon proper bancas, and so he had to create one of his own, tailored to his designs. Making the acquaintance of a Mr. Knockmealdown-who in those days was a modestly successful fence, running a Lock in Limehouse, buying goods that had been rifled from ships by mudlarks-he offered up the following Proposition: that he, Jack Shaftoe, would use his ‘French gold and English wits’ to make Mr. Knockmealdown into a Colossus among receivers, vastly expanding his holdings, and building up his inventory. Mr. Knockmealdown would become a rich man, and his Irish East London Company, as ’twas waggishly called, would become, for Jack, the grindstone that would store up the produce of his labours.

“For the first several years that Jack was back in London, he applied himself to little else. And his wisdom in doing so was demonstrated presently, when the War of the Spanish Succession began to go badly for France, what with all the great blows struck at the armies of Le Roi by Marlborough and Prince Eugene. You may be sure that Louis sent Jack very little gold in those grim years. Jack should have been reduced to the estate of a Vagabond, and been rendered useless to Le Roi, had he not been able to sustain himself from the profits of the East London Company. As it was, Jack prospered even as Louis declined, and by the time that Marlborough crushed the French at Ramillies, and stood poised to drive into the heart of France (or so it seemed), Jack had built Mr. Knockmealdown up into the most powerful Receiver in Christendom: a sort of Pirate-King, able to absorb into his warehouses the entire contents of a stolen ship as a dog swallows a fly, and, on the same tide, to load the same ship to the gunwales with swag. The East London Company thereby became the Foundation upon which Jack could build his dark Edifice. Only in recent years has he built it high enough for men such as you to note it; but you may be certain it was a-building for many a year before then.”

Here Henry Arlanc paused to sweep his gaze around the table. He gave each Clubb member a searching look in the eye, until he came to Sean Partry, who sat closest to him. Then he dropped his eyelids and bowed his head slightly, showing the thief-taker more respect than any other man in the room-even Sir Isaac. Perhaps this was for the simple reason that Partry had on his ring the keys to the manacles that now encircled Arlanc’s wrists, and the fetters around his ankles. Arlanc raised his hands up out of his lap, which required some exertion as they were linked by twenty pounds of chain, and closed them round a mug of chocolate that his wife had brought to him.

Mrs. Arlanc had been horrified but not the least bit surprised when, at the beginning of the Clubb’s meeting, as the first item of New Business, Sean Partry had stormed into the room and clapped her husband in irons. The prisoner, by contrast, had been astonished; but once this had faded he had shown no strong emotion, seeming to accept his personal ruin with true Huguenot fatalism. If anything, he seemed relieved.

“Explain to the Clubb how you became a minion of Jack Shaftoe,” Sir Isaac demanded, “and do you speak slowly and clearly, that every word may be pricked down.” For in lieu of Arlanc-who had, until minutes ago, been the Clubb’s Secretary-they had brought in a Clerk from the Temple, who was scratching away with a quill as fast as he could, writing in shorthand.

“Very well. You will already have heard many tales of the horrors visited upon the French Calvinists after the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and so I shall spare you another, save to say that my father was caught up in a dragonnade and made a galley-slave-but not before he had contrived to smuggle me and Calvin across the Manche to England, packed in barrels, like herring. Later the galley on which my father served was destroyed in a battle against a Dutch fleet in the Mediterranean.”

“But that must have occurred several years after the Edict,” said Mr. Kikin, ever the student of history.

“Indeed, sir,” said Arlanc, “for the War began, by most reckonings, in 1688, when Louis took the Palatinate and William took England.”

“We prefer to say that England took William,” Orney corrected him.

“Be that as it may, sir, the engagement that destroyed the galley of my father was a part of the said war, and it took place in the summer of 1690, off Crete.”

“He was lost at sea, then, as I take it?” asked Mr. Threader, in a touchingly genteel and delicate way.

“On the contrary, sir-he was rescued by a pirate-galley commanded by none other than Jack Shaftoe.”

At this claim, Kikin rolled his eyes, and Orney let out a “Poh!” Isaac took no note of them, but sharpened his gaze, which remained locked on Arlanc’s face. “It is consistent,” he announced. “Jack Shaftoe turned Turk in the late 1680s. His Corsairs are known to have raided Bonanza during the summer of 1690. Thence they fled through the Gates of Hercules into the Mediterranean. By late summer they had reached Cairo, as all the world now knows. Mr. Arlanc’s account is plausible.”